The Wedding People, by Alison Espach

After many failed rounds of IVF, a failed marriage and a dead cat, academic Phoebe has had enough of life and travels to a luxury hotel in Newport to end it on a high note. But Lila has booked out the entire hotel, apart from Phoebe’s room, for her six-day wedding extravaganza and she is not having a suicide wreck her big event. Against all odds the two women become friends, or at least trusted collaborators, both finding a new path that offers a hopeful future. Phoebe and Lila both take a similar journey of self-discovery, although with quite different outcomes. They get to know themselves and what they really want and how to go about getting it. It’s an interesting and often amusing examination of familial and friend relationships with a satisfying conclusion.

Murder on North Terrace, by Lainie Anderson

It is September 1917 and a member of the Board of Governors has been found murdered in the art gallery on Adelaide’s North Terrace. This sequel to The Death of Dora Black sees Woman Police Constable Kate Cocks’s offsider Ethel Bromley seconded to use her society contacts to help investigate the murder. Left overstretched and under resourced, Miss Cox struggles to keep the women and children of Adelaide safe, with the added worry of a rapist leaving a young girl for dead in the parklands. In the wearying fourth year of the war there are both demobbed and newly recruited soldiers to deal with as well. Lainie Anderson’s chops as an historian provides a fascinating window into Adelaide in the 1910s alongside a cracking mystery with engaging, if flawed, heroines.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026), directed by David Frankel

At the top of her game in journalism, Andy Sachs nevertheless finds herself in need of a job and back at Runway Magazine to rescue its reputation after a fast fashion scandal. Twenty years after the original, all the major players have reunited for this sharply funny sequel that softens the focus on fashion to depict the dire state of publishing. It also makes some digs at tech bros and media magnates along the way. Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci clearly have fun with it, with Streep and Tucci looking not a day older than in the first outing while Hathaway and Blunt certainly don’t show two decades – that’s Hollywood. The star-studded cast includes innumerable celebrity cameos, including speaking roles for Donatella Versace and Lady Gaga. There is some interesting casting in smaller roles, including Lucy Liu as a white knight, Kenneth Branagh as Mr Miranda, Justin Theroux as a tech bro and Patrick Brammall, allowed to be Australian without explanation, as a love interest. The film attempts to show that no-one is a total villain or hero, as every human is flawed, but it is difficult to accept the blind loyalty commanded by Miranda Priestly when she is so awful most of the time. Her softer side doesn’t quite ring true, making her looking like a better option only because the alternative monsters are even worse. A case of better the devil you know?

Powerless, by Lauren Roberts

Paedyn Gray is a homeless orphan, surviving the slums of Ilya by thieving and hiding her great secret – a lack of an elite ability that is essential to be allowed to live in this country. Ordinaries have been declared diseased and are banished or killed, so Paedyn’s late father trained her powers of observation to pose as a psychic. When she saves the life of the King’s enforcer, Prince Kai, Paedyn is forced to compete in the five-yearly Elite trials, pitting her ‘psychic’ skills against those with super strength, super speed, and powers of illusion, kinesis and transformation. The secret sauce to great SF and fantasy is building a believable world, which then allows the reader to suspend disbelief about events that happen within it. The low quality ketchup underlying Powerless, combined with pedestrian writing, makes this poor man’s Hunger Games an increasingly tedious read. It’s full of explicit and gratuitous violence, with a ludicrously chaste love triangle. Powerless indeed.

Three Juliets, by Minnie Darke

In 1964, aged 16, Claudie Miller was forced to give up her baby for adoption. Sixteen years later the successful designer of children’s clothes receives a diagnosis and begins the search for her lost child. She narrows it down to three candidates – Roisin, Bindi and Miranda – but can Claudie identify her daughter before it’s too late? The tale is told from the perspective of Claudie, in Sydney, in the 1960s and 80s and from that of the three young women - in Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney - in the 80s, 90s and 2000s. It clearly traces the changing attitudes to adoption and single motherhood over the decades, depicting the horrors of forced adoption and how legal reforms eventually enabled birth families to trace each other. Mothers, both natural and adoptive, get a fairly bad rap in this story – they are depicted as selfish, possessive, controlling or neglectful more than loving, although sometimes that too. It’s complicated and to some extent, realistic. The fashion is fun and an essentially sad story gets an ending that is as happy as is possible.

I Want Everything, by Dominic Amerena

Brenda Shales wrote two controversial and influential books in the 70s, before disappearing after a ruinous court case resulting from her second book. When she is recognised by a young ambitious writer and tracked to a run-down retirement village in Melbourne’s west, a misunderstanding leads to her spilling her story to him. He perpetuates the misunderstanding in an attempt to make his career, but can he maintain the deception and does it amount to literary fraud? This is a clever tale that twists in on itself and raises the question of who’s zooming who? The name of the young writer is never revealed – a slightly clunky device that has a point, made at the end of the story. This is a cruel take on the Australian literary scene and no-one comes out of it well.

Landfall, by James Bradley

A five-year-old girl is missing and a category five cyclone – the third in four years – is due to hit Sydney in the next week. Police detective Sadiya Azad must battle racism, misogyny and corruption as well as the literal rising tide of climate change to find the child and solve a murder that seems to be linked to her disappearance. Set 20 to 30 years in the future, following the ‘great melt’, Bradley paints an all-too-believable dystopian picture of where the current reality of fanning xenophobia, lip service on climate action and rising inequality is likely to take us. The tense crime thriller thinly cloaks a plea for more empathetic treatment of refugees and urgent action on climate change. It ends rather abruptly, with several questions left unanswered, but on a note of hope – based on human connection.